Charles Demuth was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism. He was born on November 8, 1883, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and died on October 23, 1935, in the same city. Demuth was a lifelong resident of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the city’s modest commercial and civic architecture was the subject of hundreds of his watercolors and paintings. His depictions of warehouses, factories, and row houses imbue these ordinary structures (sometimes ironically) with a grandeur and glamor normally associated with cathedrals, palaces, and temples.
